History shows it’s not over for the Phillies’ season. Here’s what it took for others to turn it around.

MIAMI — Don Mattingly stood up, looked around the room, and said, “Over? Did you say over? Nothing is over until we decide it is!”

Wait, no. That was Bluto from Animal House.

Rah-rah speeches aren’t Mattingly’s thing. A generational player for the George Steinbrenner Yankees before coaching in New York and managing the Dodgers and Marlins, he has been a face of the sport for more than 40 years. It’s right there in the nickname: “Donnie Baseball.”

But Mattingly is Midwest to the core, quiet and understated. The son of an Indiana mailman, he’d rather catch throws at first base in infield practice than sit in front of reporters. He isn’t uncomfortable in the spotlight; he just doesn’t seek it.

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Mattingly addressed the players, of course, after the Phillies elevated him Tuesday from bench coach to interim manager amid a 9-19 start and a 10½-game deficit in the National League East. He kept it simple, multiple players said. Stick together. Play hard. Get better every day.

“Play Phillie baseball,” shortstop Trea Turner said.

Oh, and Mattingly added another thing: Contrary to what many people think, all is not lost.

The Phillies are off to the kind of start that gets you booed off the Jumbotron at a Flyers playoff game. And their problems aren’t solvable with a managerial change alone. Whether Rob Thomson or Mattingly arranges the lineup, it still drops off after Turner, Kyle Schwarber, and Bryce Harper.

But they won their first three games under Mattingly, including walk-off victories in both games of a split doubleheader Thursday, a feat that hadn’t been achieved by the Phillies since 1998 — or any team since the Pirates in 2004.

And as long as we’re talking about history, there’s more to suggest hope exists beyond the April muck.

Since 2022, when MLB expanded the playoff field by adding the third wild card, 13 teams started 9-19 or worse before the Phillies and Mets this year. Only one — the 2024 Astros — made the playoffs; 11 wound up losing at least 100 games.

But 10 teams overcame at least one 9-19 (or worse) stretch at any point in a season to make the playoffs, including the 2023 Diamondbacks, who stumbled badly in July and August but won the pennant on the Phillies’ home turf. The Yankees recovered in 2022 and ‘24; the Guardians and Tigers did it last season.

Seldom-used Phillies utility man Dylan Moore played for the 2022 Mariners, a wild card despite a 29-39 start that included a 7-21 tailspin.

Around here, nobody will forget the ’22 Phillies, who started 22-29, replaced deposed Joe Girardi with Thomson, clinched the third NL wild card in Game 160 to end a 10-year playoff drought, and went all the way to the World Series.

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Go back two years earlier, and Turner was a central figure in one of the most famous back-from-the-dead seasons. In 2019, the Nationals were 19-31 with a minus-40 run differential at their low point. They won the World Series.

Then there’s Mattingly. He steered the Dodgers to a 30-42 start in 2013. They had a minus-51 run differential and were in last place in the NL West, 9½ games back of the division lead, on June 21.

“And we won the division,” Mattingly said, “by 10½.”

Eleven, actually.

“With talented teams, you can go out and reel off six out of 10, seven out of 10, and consistently do that, right?” Mattingly said. “We have that kind of talent.”

In separate conversations this week, Turner and Mattingly looked back at what it took to dig out of those deep holes.

Rock bottom came on May 23, 2019.

After scoring three runs in the eighth inning to take a 4-3 lead in a Thursday matinee in New York, the Nationals gave up a soul-crushing three-run homer to the Mets’ Carlos Gómez. They lost 6-4, their fifth consecutive loss within a 5-13 stretch that dropped them to 19-31, 10 games out of first place.

Turner, Washington’s leadoff-hitting shortstop, can’t recall such a profound teamwide struggle.

Until this month.

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“I remember the same feeling of like, ‘Man, how did we even get here?’” Turner said. “Knowing the type of people we have in the locker room, we knew we were way better than we played. And it didn’t make sense. It’s hard to find answers all the time.”

Turner sees other similarities between 2019 and now.

The Nationals were banged up, with Howie Kendrick, Turner, Michael A. Taylor, Ryan Zimmerman, Anthony Rendon, Juan Soto, Aníbal Sánchez, and closer Trevor Rosenthal taking turns on the injured list through the first two months. The Phillies have been without catcher J.T. Realmuto (back), closer Jhoan Duran (side), and until last week, Zack Wheeler (thoracic outlet syndrome).

And there were calls for then-Nationals manager Dave Martinez to lose his job. Unlike Thomson, Martinez was spared.

Who knows what might’ve happened if the Nats hadn’t come back from an 8-4 deficit at home on May 24? But Soto and Matt Adams hit homers late in a 12-10 victory over the Marlins.

Maybe it was a turning point. With Turner, Soto, and Rendon leading a top-heavy lineup (shades of Turner, Schwarber, and Harper), the Nationals won 12 of 16 games. They got to .500 by June 27. They were 18-8 in June and 19-7 in August. They scored seven runs in the ninth inning to beat the Mets on Sept. 3. They didn’t overtake the division-winning Braves, but with the wild card, they didn’t have to.

“I just remember playing like we kind of had nothing to lose,” Turner said. “Every night was a fight. I think we had the oldest team in baseball. We all just kind of put our head down and worked and had fun, and it paid off.

“Most importantly, I feel like it’s just kind of getting the momentum back and then just keeping that momentum.”

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Momentum is generated by starting pitching, and the Nationals had Max Scherzer, Patrick Corbin, Stephen Strasburg, and Sánchez. Scherzer finished third in Cy Young voting; Strasburg was fifth and Corbin 11th.

The Phillies are similarly built on veteran pitching, with Cristopher Sánchez, Wheeler, Jesús Luzardo, and Aaron Nola. Luzardo tossed seven scoreless innings Tuesday night in Mattingly’s first game as manager; Sánchez followed up with two runs in 6⅔ innings in the opener of the doubleheader.

“To be honest, we probably have more talent on this team than that team,” Turner said. “I mean, we had a great team, don’t get me wrong. Rendon, me, [center fielder Adam] Eaton, Soto, and then we had the big three with Max, Pat, and Stras.

“But I feel like this team’s got probably more depth and more talent. And that’s more of a compliment to this team than it is a slight to that team. I just think we have the attitude of that team as well.

“You’ve got to get your mojo back, get your momentum back. But we can do something similar to that, for sure.”

Mattingly would love to say he pressed magic buttons to defibrillate the Dodgers in 2013, or at least that he set bite-sized, incremental goals to extricate them from a 30-42 mineshaft.

But that would be disingenuous.

“My approach was we should think in terms that we’d win every day,” Mattingly said. “That’s what I was thinking. Probably along with thinking they were getting ready to fire me, to be honest with you.

“And I think it was close.”

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One year earlier, the Dodgers were sold to Guggenheim Baseball Management for a then-record $2.15 billion. The new owners inherited Mattingly. It would’ve been easy to move on from him.

Then along came Yasiel Puig, a strapping slugger from Cuba. He made his major league debut on June 3 and batted .443 with eight homers and a 1.218 OPS in his first 27 games. He finished at .319, with 19 homers, a .925 OPS, and was runner-up to late Marlins ace José Fernández for NL Rookie of the Year.

It helped, too, that Hanley Ramírez returned in June after missing most of the first two months with thumb and hamstring injuries. He batted .341 with 19 homers and a 1.026 OPS through the end of the season.

Like the 2019 Nationals, the Dodgers were anchored by the starting rotation, led by future Hall of Famers Clayton Kershaw and Zack Greinke and South Korean rookie Hyun Jin Ryu.

And beginning on June 22, they went 42-8, tied for the all-time best 50-game stretch.

But Mattingly was the calm at the center of everything. As catcher A.J. Ellis told Grantland in 2015, “I don’t think he ever changed as far as being the person he is.”

“For me, it was a matter of staying the course, staying consistent,” Mattingly recalled. “I don’t want panic coming from the coaching staff or myself. I want [the players] to feel like we trust them, we know they’re going to get better.

“That doesn’t mean you don’t work and try to get better in areas. You do that. But it doesn’t need to be, all of a sudden we’re going to flip the lineup or we’re going to pick the lineup out of a hat and hope it works. I just want to be consistent.”

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Mattingly projected consistency in his first days helming the Phillies. The batting order didn’t change; Bryson Stott figures to keep starting at second base against righties and sitting against lefties; Alec Bohm and his .426 OPS are still at third base.

But there isn’t anyone like Puig coming from triple A. (Top prospect Aidan Miller has been sidelined since February with a lower back injury.) It’s imperative, then, that the Phillies play cleaner defense, exhibit better situational hitting, and use their speed more under Mattingly than they did with Thomson.

“Donnie talked about it a lot [this week],” Turner said. “I feel like we can do everything better.”

In that case, nobody will say the season is over until the Phillies decide it is.

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Hunter Pence's 368-day stint with the Phillies was a study in extremes. Acquired at the trade deadline in 2011 as the missing right-handed bat for a World Series contender, he got dealt a year later by an underachieving team. And with the Phillies in full-on crisis mode this week, Pence sits down with "Phillies Extra," the Inquirer's baseball podcast, to discuss how quickly a team's fortunes can change. Watch here.

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Previous episodes: Paco Figueroa | Gage Wood | Scott Boras | Brian Barber | Aaron Nola | Justin Crawford | Garrett Stubbs | Kyle Schwarber | Brad Keller | J.T.Realmuto